Interesting post but I think that many of your arguments fail the status quo test. Humans from a thousand years ago viewing our relationship with technology could reasonably question our humanity or Dasein. Yet you are here writing online about your views of humanity and personhood, so you would not want a return to a thousand years ago or a stagnation at the technology of that time. Similarly, we may wonder about the personhood of the humanity of the future but given our current place high up on a hockey-stick graph I don't think this is a good argument for not prioritizing the tech growth needed to get to that future.
Mar 10, 2022·edited Mar 10, 2022Liked by Zohar Atkins
I'm reading Alasdair MacIntryre's Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? In discussing how both relativists and perspectivists cannot engage a tradition on its own terms, noting "Perspectivism....is a doctrine only possible for those who regards themselves as outside....any conception of the truth but the most minimal appears to have been discredited....theirs is not so much a conclusion about truth as an exclusion from it thereby from rational debate. Nietzsche came to understand this very well. The perspectivist must not in engage in dialectical argument with Socrates, for that way would lie what from our point of view would be involvement in a tradition of rational enquiry, and from Neitzsche's point of view subjection to the tyranny of reason. Socrates is not to be argued with; he is to be mocked for his ugliness and his bad manners. Such mockery in response to dialectic is enjoined in the aphorisitic paragraphs of Gotzen-Dammerung. And the use of aphorisms is itself instructuve. An aphorism is not an arguement. Gilles Deleuze has called it 'a play of forces'....something by means of which energy is transmitted rather than conclusions reached." Thought this interesting in light of your comments above....
MacIntyre continues: "The most obstructive feature of this kind of philosophy is its temporariness; dwelling too long in any one place will always threaten to confer upon such philosophy the continuity of enquiry, so that it become embodied as one more rational tradition. It turns out to be forms of tradition which present a threat to perspectivism rather than vice versa."
I would make a distinction between first and second order forecasting. Suppose my son walks into the room and dumps thousands of legos from a container onto the floor. Here, I don't first-order know what he's going to build. There are a certain number of types and tokens of those types. So, I know the types and tokens. Maybe there are 10 types. For me these are forecasting primitives to model. And, this is second-order knowledge. Forecasting is modeling probabilities of first-order configurations of second-order knowledge of types. It's trivially true that no one can "know" the future. Don't think anyone argues that we can. But, some people are better at modeling more probable future configurations than others. Why? I think this distinction is helpful in building out a framework for forecasting scenarios that, under status quo framework, can be judged as "a good configuration". The map is never the territory if for the simple reason that the mapping of the territory is never on the territory. Something anyone can learn from watching Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
Interesting post but I think that many of your arguments fail the status quo test. Humans from a thousand years ago viewing our relationship with technology could reasonably question our humanity or Dasein. Yet you are here writing online about your views of humanity and personhood, so you would not want a return to a thousand years ago or a stagnation at the technology of that time. Similarly, we may wonder about the personhood of the humanity of the future but given our current place high up on a hockey-stick graph I don't think this is a good argument for not prioritizing the tech growth needed to get to that future.
I'm reading Alasdair MacIntryre's Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? In discussing how both relativists and perspectivists cannot engage a tradition on its own terms, noting "Perspectivism....is a doctrine only possible for those who regards themselves as outside....any conception of the truth but the most minimal appears to have been discredited....theirs is not so much a conclusion about truth as an exclusion from it thereby from rational debate. Nietzsche came to understand this very well. The perspectivist must not in engage in dialectical argument with Socrates, for that way would lie what from our point of view would be involvement in a tradition of rational enquiry, and from Neitzsche's point of view subjection to the tyranny of reason. Socrates is not to be argued with; he is to be mocked for his ugliness and his bad manners. Such mockery in response to dialectic is enjoined in the aphorisitic paragraphs of Gotzen-Dammerung. And the use of aphorisms is itself instructuve. An aphorism is not an arguement. Gilles Deleuze has called it 'a play of forces'....something by means of which energy is transmitted rather than conclusions reached." Thought this interesting in light of your comments above....
MacIntyre continues: "The most obstructive feature of this kind of philosophy is its temporariness; dwelling too long in any one place will always threaten to confer upon such philosophy the continuity of enquiry, so that it become embodied as one more rational tradition. It turns out to be forms of tradition which present a threat to perspectivism rather than vice versa."
I would make a distinction between first and second order forecasting. Suppose my son walks into the room and dumps thousands of legos from a container onto the floor. Here, I don't first-order know what he's going to build. There are a certain number of types and tokens of those types. So, I know the types and tokens. Maybe there are 10 types. For me these are forecasting primitives to model. And, this is second-order knowledge. Forecasting is modeling probabilities of first-order configurations of second-order knowledge of types. It's trivially true that no one can "know" the future. Don't think anyone argues that we can. But, some people are better at modeling more probable future configurations than others. Why? I think this distinction is helpful in building out a framework for forecasting scenarios that, under status quo framework, can be judged as "a good configuration". The map is never the territory if for the simple reason that the mapping of the territory is never on the territory. Something anyone can learn from watching Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
We cannot paint the ground we stand on, nor can the long-termist judge whether it is good to be human.